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After paying less interest in bleeding edge performance with its G4, the LG G5 marks the company’s return to the very highest performance segment of the mobile market, with the inclusion of a Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 processor. However this now won’t be the case across the entire globe. Cristián Correa, LG’s sales manager for Chile, has stated that there will be a slightly different LG G5 model heading out to customers in the Latin American markets, which packs a Snapdragon 652 SoC instead.

Consumers shouldn’t be too alarmed by the misleadingly large disparity that Qualcomm’s naming scheme hints at. The Snapdragon 652 is a big.LITTLE octa-core SoC that is built from four high performance Cortex-A72 cores and four more energy efficient Cortex-A53 cores, making it fairly comparable to last year’s high-end Snapdragon 810 chip. Consumers certainly shouldn’t have cause to complain about CPU performance, as there’s enough power here for your day to day tasks and more. The chip also retains Quick Charge 3.0, 4K video capture, and LTE-Advanced networking features, albeit at Cat 7 rather than Cat 12 speeds.

See also:

Qualcomm renaming Snapdragon 618 and 620 processors… but why?

December 17, 2015

However, the Snapdragon 652 is built on a 28nm HPm manufacturing process, rather than Samsung’s power efficient 14nm FinFET technology, and the SoC features a lower performance Adreno 510 GPU that will certainly lower the handset’s gaming performance. Reference to a lower specced LG G5 variant had been spotted in benchmarks earlier in the month, and the handset will carry the LG H840 model number and 3GB rather than 4GB of RAM as well. Although this shouldn’t have too much of an impact on performance.

The same announcement indicates that the new LG 360 virtual reality headset won’t be available in the region either, which seems like another blow for some customers. However, Correa states that the reason is simply down to a lack of interest in virtual reality in the region.

Will the change to the processor specifications make you think twice about picking up the LG G5 in Latin America?

Lead Technical Writer at Android Authority, covering the latest trends in consumer electronics and hardware. In his spare moments, you'll probably find him tinkering with audio electronics and programming.